


Legends Alive

by HeatedHeadwear (SplickedyHat)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen, No Plot, because I want to, go away I love ancestors too much, gratuitous paragraphs of descriptive headcanon stuff, you'll be like why does she keep talking about the way they smell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 10:01:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1222117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplickedyHat/pseuds/HeatedHeadwear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're not what was expected.  Legends rarely are; when an idea comes into conflict with reality, the idea breaks first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legends Alive

**Author's Note:**

> Not saying these are all my headcanons--some of them I haven't really thought about. But since we know so little about the ancestors, I thought I'd muck around and find ways to describe them that go beyond what we get from their brief paragraphs in canon. Signless goes last because he is an appropriate way to end it I think.  
> These are kind of supposed to be from the POV of each one's descendant, but there's not much of their personalities in the writing. There's no real reason why a lot of them would even have expectations for their ancestors. They were just a vehicle for description, so apparently Terezi can see a lot better now. //shrug

The empress lives up to her legend, but in a subtly different way than you had thought she would.  She looks young and beautiful, but in such an _old_ way.  Her skin is glossy, dark, unwrinkled, but her eyes are ancient and calculating and bright, _bright_ fuschia. Her lashes, thick and pink and dusted with cosmetic sparkles, seem to wave when she blinks, dragging behind the movement of her lids.  Her hair has gone untamed for millennia and its thick curls undulate behind her, snaking through each other, a busy mass of living black seaweed.  She is dressed in sleek black and the finery of shipwrecks. Greening gold snakes up her arms, sparkles on her fins, rings the lengths of her immense horns.

The threatening air around her does not come from any particular violence in her behavior.  She moves with a heavy, swaggering slowness, in the same way that a wave begins to crest, building anticipation for the moment when it crashes down. Her _presence_ has age, the age of the darkness at the bottom of the sea, unfathomable sweeps of giving orders and having them obeyed.

And her voice is deep too, sonorous as whalesong and quick as a sharkbite.  “Hey gill, you gonna make a move or what?”

**~**

He doesn’t smell like a seadweller or even a sailor. There’s a sweet, slightly flowery scent around him that blocks out the ship’s sharp briny odor. His armor is well-used—scarred in places, dented in others—but well-polished too.  You could see your face in his breastplate if you got close enough. When he walks there’s always one arm sweeping that rippling purple cloak out of his way.  It’s a casual movement, ingrained habit, and the figure he cuts is all the more regal for that.  There’s such arrogance in the tilt of his jaw and the rhythm of his walk, every movement a reminder of his hatchright.

For all his vanity, though, the scars on his face and arms and the easy way he handles the godrifle speak to a lifetime of battle. A rough temper shows itself in the flashes of shark-like teeth and narrowed violet eye and the whipping of his cloak. He is a prince and a murderer; the empress’s Orphaner must be absolutely ruthless in battle.

He says nothing, only points Ahab’s Crosshairs directly at your face and waits for an explanation.

~

He’s tall, incredibly tall, all knobs of bone and rangy muscle and rough gray skin.  His paint is thick and his eyes are orange and he is utterly silent. You thought he would be loud and wild, but for the moment at least he is simply strangely, perfectly quiet. The greasy curls of his black mane seem to twist as he walks. When he grins, revealing long, slightly yellowing fangs, the white and gray paste daubed on his face splits into deep-set cracks.

He smells of the multicolored blood spotting his clothes and daymares and sickness.  In his heavy silence your head keens and your stomach churns. It’s worse because it’s the fear of nothing in particular, just an overwhelming terror that won’t settle or become clear.  It’s only one part fear of him, and another part of it is the look he gives you that says he knows, he knows you’re afraid and he knows what it is you fear.

His voice explodes out of nothingness with no warning— _“WHAT MASTERS SERVE YOU, LITTLE BITCH BOY?”_

~

He seems carved from stone.  The planes of his face are granite, edges unsoftened, forehead deeply creased.  His features seem permanently set in an expression of deep concern, and the sheen on his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose only adds to that.  He breathes through his nose, wide nostrils flickering with every inhale, and his chest expands like a bellows.

He is immense, but he seems to endeavor to take up as little space as possible.  Hunched over, shoulder muscles bunched under his gleaming blue armor, he looks like a small mountain.  Perhaps in battle he unfolds, unleashes his strength, but here and now he just seems out of his element.

You expected a voice like a rumble in the earth, but it’s an ordinary bass—gentle and maybe a little bit hoarse. “State your name and business.”

~

She’s neither as voluptuous nor as beautiful as you had expected.  Or perhaps she is, but the danger ground into the sharp lines of her body is making it harder to see. You feel _soft_ looking at her.  Her lips are chapped under glossy cerulean paint; her cheeks are worn blue from the wind; there are crystals of salt bound in her lashes and you can smell the sea on her.   Her hand rests on the pommel of her sword in an utterly casual way, and the damasked blue blade flashes into view under her coat whenever she pushes at the hilt.  She stands like a queen on perigees-old sea legs, while around her crew members rush to repair the damage of the storm.

Her hair is an impressive mass of coarse black shocks, and when she looks at you through her bangs, you can feel her mirroring your movements, your expressions.  The pupils of her eightfold eye contract and you feel every thread of your muscles tighten in a fight-or-flight response.

When she speaks, her voice is hoarse but oddly velvety—a voice that could scream into the wind or seduce in the shadows. “Explain to me immediately why you wear my sign, sandfly.”

~

She doesn’t look as badass as you had hoped. She looks—well—like a legislacerator, a courtblock gavelbanger, a penpusher.  A little more rugged and well-traveled perhaps, but the neatness of her clothes and hair says _first day of a case, looking snappy for His Tyranny._

It’s when she moves that you understand that this is part of what makes her so dangerous.  No other legislacerator could _be_ so neat. There is no blood spattered on her clothes, no wounds on her clean gray skin.  She smells of cherries and aloe and dry paper and her movements are as precise as troll origami folds.  She is full of angles and near-military sharpness.  When she unsheathes her swordcane, she is completely confident in its position; there is nothing aimless about the way she moves it.  You think she could stab an enemy through the throat without blinking.

For all of this seemingly cold perfection, her she grins when she speaks and there’s something like dangerous exuberance in her tone. “And what are you doing here? I’ll decide your sentence based on your testimony…answer carefully!”

~

She’s so _tall_. She’s so tall, but strangely, so young too. Her horns are clean, her teeth still sharp, and she preens self-consciously in the presence of quadrant prospects, though she has to know there’s no space in her vagabond life for romance. Occasionally, one finger will curl and re-curl a spike of hair by her cheek, or she’ll shake out her skirts to loosen dirt and creases.  Her dress has the look of finery, meant for indoor work, that’s been put through a great deal of outdoor wear and tear.  And there’s a kind of residual grace in the way she moves, too, even in moments of stress.  She was trained for a higher calling, and you wonder if she feels she’s still fulfilling it, somehow.

She cares for her son and his friends as any lusus might—physically, chivvying them along and occasionally going so far as to knock one of them lightly across the head.  And her “son” reciprocates as others might with their creature-parents, occasionally knocking her back with no real aggression or chiding her when she becomes distracted.  There is a sense, however, that when it comes down to it, he will rely on her decisions. In moments of stress, his eye is always on her.

She shifts slightly until she’s standing in front of him and her voice is cold when she says, “And you are…?”

~

She’s barefoot and barehanded and rough with callouses. Her hair is wild. She has more scars than you—stretched lines of skin criss-crossing her shoulders and face.  There’s one right under her left eye and her eyes are always moving, flicking one way and then another, her nostrils flaring. She’s all curiosity and watchfulness and instinct, compact and well-muscled and taut as a bowstring. In her movements is the impulsive brutality of a huntress.  When she looks at the man in the torn gray cloak, there is fondness and affection in her eyes, but a kind of fierceness too, and he looks the same.  It’s not sweet, gentle flushed love. There’s an intensity born of mutual reliance for survival.

She fights with complete efficiency. There’s no movement wasted, just a rush to reach close quarters and then continuous, powerful strokes until her opponent is dead or subdued.  Her teeth are very sharp, unwashed after her last kill and a little bit blue around the dark gums.  There’s more blue crusted under her claws.

She says, “Hello, little one, have you come to hear the Word?”

~

The air around him buzzes.  It’s almost imperceptible but something about it resonates in your head—your skull, not your ears.  The skin around his eyes is slightly warped and discolored, and his eyebrows have been thinned to the point of nonexistence.  The same kind of scarring can be seen in patches on his skinny hands and forearms.

For all that his figure is so tight and bony he’s oddly relaxed, never responding to small threats with changes in body language. Instead, bicolored sparks climb his horns lazily, sometimes forming twisting strands between the double spikes. His hair prickles. He doesn’t aggress by tilting his horns down, but rather with a toss of his head that makes the psionic lights flare a bit brighter, menacing.  And on closer inspection, there are a hundred sharp little tics that appear—short, near-inaudible whistles between his crowded front teeth, the twitch of one ear, the jerk of a shoulder, the impatient tapping of his fingers. They become more noticeable the more psionic energy builds and sparks.

His first words to you are, “Not a thtep closer.”

~

He doesn’t quite move like a troll. One moment it’s the sinuous twist of a cat, the next the gentle head-toss of a hoofbeast.  For all this, though, every movement belongs to him, becomes part of the defiance in his posture.  There’s nothing specific he ought to be defying at the moment, but the set of his shoulders and the sharpness in his glossy brown eyes dare anyone to try putting him down or start a fight.  He looks at his subordinates in a way that suggests he expects the same obedience from them that he would from his beast charges.

His horns are incredibly large, gracefully shaped but with a span almost as wide as he is tall.  There’s a certain slowness to the way he turns his head, inertia from their length.  His wings, at first limp and lifeless, have begun to flutter and unfold as he gets more agitated. And for all the muscle needed to carry the immense rack and support him in flight, he is lean; food must be short. He is dressed all in the brown of earth and the white of bones and the red of martyr’s blood. And speaking of blood, there’s a brown-soaked bandaged wrapped around his left thigh, a spatter of dried purple across his neck and jaw.

His words are slow and careful, his voice deep in his chest.  “Identify yourself.”

~

She looks resentful of everything, up to and including the smell of must and licorice clinging to her.  It doesn’t suit her, and neither does the green dress. They’re masking a woman full to the brim with slow, unfulfilled rage.  It’s not raw or immediate; it’s old, set into her.  It’s actually impressive, the thought that she could reach adulthood carrying that resentment without breaking under it.  You can see her lip curling and the muscles in her forearm tightening with her grip on those gleaming white needles. 

Her appearance is just as imagined, however—immaculate as a fleshless skeleton, regal as Her Imperious Condescension. Her back is ramrod straight, her head held high, her movements purposeful.  Her hair is black silk, carefully groomed for the day, long tails curling around her in the heat ripple of telekinetic levitation.  Rust-lined eyes sear yours with a dizzying iridescent glow.

She smiles without a hint of humor and says, “Oh. You.”

~

He stinks, a little.

You weren’t really expecting him to stink—or if he did, you would have expected iron and blood and the hot breath of expelled anger, not the smell of days-old sweat and dirt and unwashed clothes. You weren’t expecting the fading crimson bruises on his face.  The cloak he’s wearing is ragged and threadbare there is a gradient of filth on it, thickest near the ground.  The cuts in his hood that allow for horn holes look like they were cut with a sharp rock at best and although the red stitching is neatly done the corners don’t meet evenly at the hem.  His tangled hair obscured his face when he was looking down but seeing him face to face you think he seems…tired. Worried, and not for anyone in particular; every glance he gives the people around you suggests a deep, helpless concern for each of them.  But there’s anger too, a certain hardness in the planes of his face.  His scarlet eyes are a little bit bloodshot and there’s a little wrinkle by on corner of his mouth that suggests a near-permanent one-sided grimace.

He says,  “The fuck do you want, grubling?”


End file.
